By:	Jouni Miettunen
Date:	28 March 1995

Title:	Graphics Programming PowerPack
Author:	Michael Jones
Publ:	SAMS Publishing
Year:	1992
Pages:	342
Price:	24.95 USD
ISBN 0-672-30120-2

This is not a book, this is a manual. An excellent one, I'd like to add.

I bought the book being attracted by the name and a fancy cover in an
one inch high picture in a book catalog. The ad text promised me "104
graphics functions" and truly I was expecting a real "powerpack" of
graphics programming with loads of asm source code. Boy, was I wrong!

The book comes with a 3 1/2 DD disk filled with a "special version of
Genus Microprogramming's GX Development Series" header files, sample C
source, library files and source to Apples & Oranges (reversi) game.
This is a subset of the better known Genus GX graphics library and a
manual to it. The limitations are that only max 640x480x16 mode is
supported and functions can use only conventional memory.

The book is organized into a few segments: an short introduction, manual
pages separately for Graphics Kernel functions (gxFunction), Graphics
functions (grFunction), Graphics Effects functions (fxFunction) and PCX
Image File functions (pcxFunction). As appendixes there are descriptions
for used data structures and constants and a short introduction to the
bonus game. An interesting detail is that there's only one advertize for
the full Genus GX library and even that was hidden after the index.

Graphics PowerPack really can't be judges as a book, since very few
pages are dedicated to general text. This is small compact manual, the
layout is obviously designed and uses well 3 different fonts and some
graphics decorations. The manual pages itself have a big visible title,
a short intro to the function with syntax, parameter explanations with
name, type and description, some additional comments, return value,
pointers to the other interesting functions and finally a stand-alone
example in C. I only had to add the function name at the top corner of
the page to make it The Perfect Manual.

At first I was very disappointed to the book, it was almost an exact
opposite of what I was expecting.. but then I desided to give it a try.
Genus GX is one of the big and old commercial graphics libraries and
PowerPack seems to be quite a usable set of functions, only bitmap fonts
(ROM fonts supported) and polygons are missing. I haven't been able to
locate anything I could point at and call a bug, still occasionally
something weird happened with my programs.. Usually I found the bugs in
my code, thought.

I have written a few programs with PowerPack and am happy with it. At
least I've used this book, unlike some of the books that really came
with loads of asm source code. I also believe it has effected my coding
style, making it more orderly and readable, even though here I'd like to
give the credit to Code Complete by Steve McConnell.


Jouni Miettunen